Firstly, it's good that Slaven has come out and announced that Poco and Barca are no longer viable long-term products. Much as I hate to see them go, it is helpful to know where we stand.

I am looking to migrate away from Barca to something else for Win7. I have my eye on Postbox or Thunderbird as possible options. I get the impression that there's no easy way to export my settings, emails, contacts and appointments from Barca to something else.

Barca exports all data to relatively standard formats: calendar and tasks to iCalendar format, address book to LDIF and CSV, folders to rfc822 (which is defacto mbox and it's not really an export as it's format in which the folder is stored natively, it's same format that Thunderbird uses I believe I was able to transfer data even just by copying the files). The thing is whether the programs you named support import from these formats.

As for Thunderbird and Postbox: folder files format should be same, and Lightning the calendar extension for Thunderbird supports iCalendar format, also LDIF format seems supported (on quick Google, I don't have Thunderbird installed currently).

For another example, I have a test install of eM Client on my machine, it seems to support iCalendar, mbox and csv so theoretically it could also import all Barca data (I didn't test it, but it's in the menu).

Thanks for the quick reply - sorry it's taken me a while to response, but I've only just had time for a try.

If I export my address book to LDIF, it seems to lose some details. For example, dates of birth aren't included, neither are addresses. Think it's particularly bad if a contact is a member of a group. CSV file seems to include more data but again with groups it doesn't seem to work so well.

(I've tried both importing into thunderbird and also opening up in notepad/opencalc to check out the files.)

I tried exporting a calendar as ICS and although from notepad it looks pretty much OK (from what I can tell), importing it into thunderbird doesn't seem to do anything. I did notice that all events have a DTSTAMP of 20040211T190643Z but maybe that's not important ??

Not tried mail yet. I presume I need to create a new mail account, and then overwrite the files from the ones in Barca?

I've not heard of EM Client, so maybe I'll give that a go as it looks reasonably good from the web site.

[Edit] seems EM Client can cope with the calendar export and looks like it has more options for importing. It can't handle the CSV import either - but I think the contacts exports from Barca aren't really up to scratch.

Bear in mind you should got to Barca and do folder > Compress All Folders first or you'll find random messages you thought you'd deleted returning.

A couple of issues with this: it doesn't take across the "unread" indicators - all messages come over as unread. Secondly, and more annoyingly, it doesn't appear to take over any attachments.

As far as the calendar is concerned, for some reason I didn't have any luck with an export/import of iCalendar format. So I imported into EC Client then exported again in the same format - this one went into thunderbird ok. (Note: it is possible I did something wrong with the first import so this might not be necessary, but it worked.)

Then I removed all contacts from all groups and exported to LDIF. Unfortunately this is a complete mess and it only imports in a fraction of the information. Not sure if anything can be done or not, so I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and go through each contact in turn adding in their details.

Annoying about the contacts and attachments but doubt there's much that can be done.

mrgrieves wrote:Then I removed all contacts from all groups and exported to LDIF. Unfortunately this is a complete mess and it only imports in a fraction of the information. Not sure if anything can be done or not, so I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and go through each contact in turn adding in their details.

Annoying about the contacts and attachments but doubt there's much that can be done.

As for contacts you can try to export to both LDIF and CSV, then play with both with Dawn:http://mysite.verizon.net/zakharin/software/Dawn/It's old software and bit buggy but might be worth a try maybe some of the possible ways of conversion through Dawn might work better.

mrgrieves wrote:Then I removed all contacts from all groups and exported to LDIF. Unfortunately this is a complete mess and it only imports in a fraction of the information. Not sure if anything can be done or not, so I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and go through each contact in turn adding in their details.

I'm working on a conversion utility that will handle the problem related to GROUPS in Barca and Pocomail in some way. It might take couple of weeks due to no free time and little coding skill, but I already have some core code in place, so if you have urgent conversion need and don't mind sending me the sensitive address book data, I'll probably be able to do some kind of conversion for you in such case within a couple of days, just send me an email. (It's mostly the "making it user friendly and for public consumption" part that'll delay it for next year).